Books of the year 2022

I’m a big reader. It’s my main source of recreation and feeds into my broader quest to understand everything about everything. This year I read 92 books, which is about normal for me. I don’t have a particular method to what I read, I just chase up whatever I’m interested in at that time, and…

Advertisement

Reading log for 2019

The end of a year usually brings with it a rash of people reflecting on the past year and planning for the next. Rather than comment on the various aspects of my life which are woven too completely to entirely separate, I thought I'd post the list of books I read in the year, and…

The e-Reader – I may have been wrong

It turns out that the fuddy-duddies were right. Even though they're not always the most practical, paper books are magical.

Arabian Knight

Wilfred Thesiger was an Englishman who spent the late 1940s travelling through Arabia. He wrote a book about it, named Arabian Sands, which I have just finished reading, and which is something of a classic in the world of masochistic adventure literature. It's a fine work, full of little spatterings of detail and interest about…

Literary disability

For someone who reads a lot, I have a really hard time with so-called "literary" fiction. Snide judgements about definitions aside, I'm much more of an information-centred person, rather than a story-centred person.  The snarkier part of me points out that a lot of lit fic is devoid of plot as well, preferring to concentrate…